Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature

6. Terra and Trauma: The Geopolitics of the Real

6 ‫ﱚ‬ TERRA AND TRAUMA The Geopolitics of the Real Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism1 From Lessons of Darkness (1992). Directed by Werner Herzog. Credit: Canal+/Première. 254 TERRA AND TRAUMA I believe that without recognizing it we have already stepped over the threshold of such a change: that we are at the end of nature. Bill McKibben2 This was once a forest, before it was covered with oil. Everything that looks like water is in actuality oil. Ponds and lakes are spread out all over the land. The oil is treacherous because it reflects the sky. The oil is trying to disguise itself as water. Werner Herzog, Lessons of Darkness (1991) Our survival on this planet is not only threatened by environmental damage but by a degeneration in the fabric of social solidarity and in the modes of psychical life, which must literally be reinvented. The refoundation of politics will have to pass through the aesthetic and analytical dimensions implied in the three ecologies— the environment, the socius and the psyche. We cannot conceive of solutions to the poisoning of the atmosphere and to global warming due to the greenhouse effect, or to the problem of population control, without a mutation of mentality, without promoting a new art of living in society. [. . .] The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm3 IT IS TIME TO RECAPITULATE the argument made so far. The universe, I have argued, is best thought of as a concatenation of events or moments of experience. In the specific experience of watching a film, we, its viewers, are drawn into the world of that film. We are taken on a journey into a particular film-world. Over the course of the moments that constitute our experience of the film, we selectively take up the lures and affordances the film presents to us. These lures consist of three types: those that are simply there before us; those that are there by virtue of their relations with those that preceded them; and those that are there by virtue of all that we bring to them. We are drawn into film-worlds through a triadic process: first, through an affective vibration alongside its immediate, spectacular texture; second, through a “sliding into” the sequentiality of its forward movement, its character as “one thing happening after another,” which generates connections between events and therefore a kind of primary meaningfulness; and third, through a complex, productive, cognitive and emotional engagement with what we are watching, an engagement that generates meanings and affects according to the resemblances, references, and other connections made between the film and the world outside the film. Such exoreferential meanings and affects are generated in all The Geopolitics of the Real 255 viewers of any given film, and they in turn contribute to the rearrangement of the perceptual ecologies of the larger world. In their making, distribution, and consumption, films also rearrange the material and social ecologies of that world, but it is the perceptual work of film that constitutes its most distinctive and generative function. Film-worlds, like all worlds, are held together along a series of dimensional variables, of which three have concerned us here: the anthropomorphic, the geomorphic, and the biomorphic. These three echo the structure of experience in general, insofar as every moment of experience can be distinguished into three elements: a subjectivating pole, an objectivating pole, and a relationship between the two. The first of these is the subjectivity that prehends or takes account of things in its environment in a way that constitutes its particular experience of that environment. It is the active doing, which is the active making of a self, a subject, a becoming-as and a becoming-to. For humans, this is the anthropomorphic, the becoming that defines us in terms of its own end point (which always remains open). The second pole is the object or set of objects that is prehended, the becoming-for insofar as an object, once constituted as such, is always an object for a subject; this always consists of objectified remnants, as it were, left over from previous moments of subjectivation...